One of the awesome features of VVols is the ability to easily recover a destroyed VMDK within 24 hours without even needed snapshots or backups. There are essentially going to be two ways to recover a deleted VMDK within 24 hours. The first and easiest way will be with the Everpure vSphere Web Client Plugin. The second and a little more work would be without the web client plugin.
With the Everpure Web Client Plugin
- >> Here is the Workflow to recover a VVol VM VMDK with the plugin: (click to expand)
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The Virtual Disk is deleted from vCenter when editing the VM's settings.
Now that virtual disk is deleted from the VM and on the FlashArray you can see that the data VVol is destroyed and will pend eradication for 24 hours.
To recover the virtual disk, navigate to the VM, click on FlashArray Virtual Volume Objects and then click on Restore Deleted Disk.
Then select the deleted disk and click restore.
Looking at the FlashArray, you'll see that the Volume has been recovered.
Looking back at the VM's Virtual Volume Objects tab, you'll see that the Virtual Disk is restored. You can log into the Guest OS and check that the volume is still all good with the Guest OS.
All done, easy and quick when you use the plugin!
Without the Everpure Web Client Plugin
Use the plugin...seriously, just use the plugin. If you can't, don't want to or won't use the plugin, then here is what you'd need to do.
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From the Guest OS, check that everything is recovered.
- >> Click to expand and view the Workflow:
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Here the destroyed volume is getting recovered and renamed.
Now in vCenter create a new Virtual Disk that is the same size as the recovered Data VVol.
Then copy out the recovered data VVol and overwrite the new data VVol.
Now, this isn't to say that there are ways to recover this via PowerCLI or the vCenter API. For the sake of this KB though, I won't go into that. It would make for some good future blog posts though :)